New Horizon

About an hour drive outside of Port-Au-Prince we made it to New Horizon School.  We were greeted by Mr. Bernard Martinod himself, the visionary of the New Horizon Community.  Mr. Martinod is French and has spent most of the past 20 years in Haiti.  The school currently holds kindergarten through 8^th grade with students coming from five primary villages around the school.  Mr. Martinod told us about his vision to create a deep sustainable change throughout Haiti starting with New Horizon. He wants to start with children at 3 years of age at the school and educate them for the future.  The compound not only has classrooms, but they also have a brand new facility for lunch to take place, a computer lab, and a new multi-purpose facility that Mr. Martinod envisions to facilitate classes, have a larger computer lab, and to act as a community center for the surrounding communities. Mr. Martinod is an angel. After the earthquakes he built apartment buildings for the hospital workers of the nearby hospital.  Every month the workers pay rent and once they have paid Mr. Martinod $1,200 US they own the apartment.  This is unheard of, especially in Haiti!! he said that the only reason that he even has them pay this small sum is so that they have a sense of ownership of their apartment. Mr. Martinod takes the money from rent and puts it towards the school and pays tuition for students whose families cannot afford it. 

Mr. Martinod (on the right) telling us about his vision for The New Horizon Community. 

Mr. Martinod founded New Horizon in 2007 and has continued to grow and create a sustainable foundation for the surrounding communities.  He is truly an inspiration for the development of Haiti and truly cares about the people with whom he is working with. The children at the school were very excited to see us and loved taking pictures! The atmosphere that New Horizon provides for these children is something that is very rare in Haiti.  They are provided with a sense of hope for their own future and New Horizon helps to foster these children into succeeding in their education so that they will one day become agents of change in their own community.  It was wonderful to see all the children and see the sheer joy that they had from being at the school.  When students walked by Mr. Martinod every student could not wait to give him a hug and he hugged every child back like he had not seen them in ages. His ambition and passion for the people of Haiti is memorizing and I hope that someday I can make just a sliver of the impact that he has made for thousands of individuals.